To count or not to count…

Inquiring minds want to know: For those of you that have a stat counter, do you ever find yourself obsessing over your audience? My stat counter is the free kind. The kind that gives just enough information to make my imagination runneth wild and free a little bit like a mother on prom night. I don’t really get what you GET if you PAY for your stat counter. Does it tell you that the person in Singapore who visited at three in the morning is married or single, Christian or agnostic, employed or unemployed? No matter. I’m too cheap to care so deeply. And so I’ll continue to wonder and let my stats gently drive me from a paranoid pschizo to a raving lunatic…. IF I decide to keep it.

On the one hand, it’s interesting to see how people stumble upon my blog like a big crack in the internet sidewalk. (And now that I’ve used the words BIG CRACK, someone else will surely take a wrong turn at Google and stumble yet again.) But what I find more interesting is the list of hits I get from places who’s description appears vaguely familiar. Could that possibly be… my boss?? And this one here looks sneakily like… my grandpa, maybe. It couldn’t possibly be… my eight-year-old nephew, could it?? What if my boss, my grandpa, AND nephew wandered upon my blog on the day I decided to write about my boobs AND my period?! It’s disturbing enough to almost make me ditch the stat counter altogether. The whole purpose of subscribing to it in the first place was because I wanted a way of knowing whether this blog thing was worth my time. If it turned out that no one was reading me, I told myself that maybe I should probably just stick to sending my other half emails loaded with droning nothingness and obsessive insignificance and shameless preening amidst stories about the funny whatnots that our kids do/make/think/and blather about when he’s not around. Fortunately for Allan, I found a small group of people to exchange kiddy stories and random thoughts with. But do you ever feel weird when you realize that maybe there’s someone lurking out there that isn’t part of the usual nonjudgmental, boob-story-appreciative gang? Did Richard Pryor ever feel strange imagining his Sunday school teacher or second-grade crush or great-grandmother sitting in the back of the room listening to him say words that would make those women turn a shade darker than their sensible pink lipstick? Disturbing, just disturbing.

But the bottom line is that, when I weigh my paranoia against the alternative — censoring myself for that small handful of people who would be embarrassed if my couth slipped every now and again, living with the paranoia wins. So if you’re reading this now, sorry if my previous meme made you blush, gramps. But if it makes you feel any better, I promise to NEVER post the visuals. And here's hoping that my overzealous imagination and paranoid tendencies won’t drive me to removing the stat counter; I get strange pleasure in knowing that someone came here looking for pictures of seeping tonsils and toenail polish under a microscope. Did I just say strange pleasure?!